Thursday, December 9, 2010

The New Poor Professional Class: Suited, Booted & Broke


Master's degrees or more, business suits, living check-to-check and a job are required for this group. Please make sure you are ducking and dodging from the Department of Education and consolidation loan agencies. Your tuition loans that are so high, your debt for attending a university equates a monthly mortgage payment.

You front at Starbucks, nursing on a latte you've been drinking for about 5 hours, hoping that you will bump into someone. Praying that you will meet high-powered someone that will put you on. You ARE employed, but you barely make enough to make ends meet. Some of you take care of your parents because you are a first generation corporate person. Some pay for your grandparents medication, and have to decide which bill you can pay this month.

Or take first generation attorneys, doctors and corporate workers who were not given basic business guidance like setting up your own corporation. And even those who did not have a mentor that opened them to a network in which they could move up.

Suze Orman's "unrealistic" and demeaning money advice can kiss your ass. She said higher education was a luxury, but school was your passageway into circles you were not allowed . . . and frankly with the crunching economy, you've found out that you still are not in.

People gasp and believe that people who have a degree and a job, and are in strenuous economic circumstances are at fault. And people who are in this situation are too ashamed to say that they may look the part, and play the part; but their accounts are sputtering. In fact, they never really came to life. The degree they worked so hard for really is not paying off --- literally.

In fact, many who persevered until their 20s or 30s to garner degrees to situate themselves in good jobs, end up struggling to pay off debts of school loans and mortgages the last half of their lives.

3 ish talking intellectuals holla at a sista:

Reggie said...

Pathetic ain't it?!?

BigmacInPittsburgh said...

I guess this is when we all start to realize the hype is not what it's all cracked up to be.
Maybe we need to take some of what was learned in school and start a business of some type using those skills.
"God blesses the child who has their own".

bayoucreole said...

When I was a LPN, people with Sociology or Psychology degrees would hate us. Why? Because, we were making more than them with a trade school diploma than they were with a Bachelor's.
Kinda knocked them off of their high horse of, " I have a degree and you don't." The starting pay was great and,because of the shortage,I had the ability to make as much money as I wanted to (as long as my body could hang) and they didn't.